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Rejoice Makoni–Herald Correspondent

The country’s largest integrated media house Zimpapers continues to shine as its products have once again maintained dominance on the media market through its newspapers, radio and television platforms which are proving to be the people’s favourite.

A latest Zimbabwe All Media Product Survey (ZAMPS) of 2nd half of 2021 to the 2nd half of 2022 showed that The Herald maintained its pole position as the most read daily newspaper with a 52 percent share.

According to the statistics which showed that 23 percent of the adult population read daily newspapers and 13 percent weekly, Zimpapers most read weekly paper, The Sunday Mail, also dominated after having increased its readership with seven percent.

As for The Herald it dominated in both rural and urban markets with 58 percent of readers saying they read the physical copy while 31 percent through an array of online platforms.

Another Zimpapers daily paper, The Chronicle, while its readership declined from 29 percent in the 2nd half of 2021 to 24 percent in the 2nd half of 2022 still came out third.

The ZAMPS statistics also revealed that 49 percent of The Chronicle readers preferred online platforms while 38 percent accessed it through the physical copies. Zimpapers tabloid paper, H-Metro claimed fourth position with 24 percent of readers among them 53 percent read the physical copies while 20 percent read via online platforms.

The ZAMPS report showed that the majority of readers in both rural and urban areas are now preferring to get the news online. In the weekly newspapers category, The Sunday Mail readership increased from 42 percent to 49 percent of its hard copy readership followed closely by other Zimpapers products Manica Post and Kwayedza respectively.

The Manica Post garnered 10 percent of the readers of the hard copy and 13 percent of online readers while Kwayedza had 10 percent of the hard copy and 26 percent of online readers.

Sunday News readership also increased from 9 percent to 10 percent.

However, there was a decline in readership for some publications such as Kwayedza with a slight margin from 11 percent to 10 percent, Manica Post from 14 to 10 percent, B Metro from 13 to 9 percent and Umthunywa from 5 to 2 percent.

On the radio segment, Star FM had a 25 percent listenership among radio listeners in Zimbabwe while Diamond Fm has 9 percent, Capitalk and Nyami Nyami FM now Platinum Fm have 1 percent respectively.

Star FM is still dominating the urban listenership space with 17 percent and its rural listenership has also grown from 8 to 9 percent.

On the television segment, ZTN recorded viewership growth among the satellite television viewers from 0, 41 percent to 0, 71 percent while another new private television station, 3ktv’s viewership declined from 1, 68 percent in the previous survey to 1 percent percent in the latest survey results.

The ZAMPS is an independent board mandated to monitor and undertake the independent market research on behalf of advertisers, the media, publishers, advertising agencies and public relations consultants in the country.

The ZAMPS report seeks to gather yearly data on different media and product consumption.